Supreme Court Monitoring of the United States Courts of Appeals En Banc

Abstract

This article considers systematically whether the Supreme Court is more likely to review an en banc court of appeals decision than a panel decision. First, we consider Supreme Court review of en banc cases during the Rehnquist Court. Then, in a multivariate empirical analysis of a three-circuit subset of those cases, we control for other variables found to influence the Court's certiorari decision, such as Solicitor General or amicus curiae support for the certiorari petition, a dissent from the court of appeal's opinion, an outcome contrary to the Court's ideological composition, and an intercircuit conflict. The discussion is situated in a larger context of how legal scholars and political scientists have addressed the Rehnquist Court's shrunken caseload from both empirical and policy perspectives.